200 Lire - Ioannes Paulus II Queen of Peace

The "Queen of Peace" theme in 1987 was directly tied to the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, which had been drawing millions of pilgrims since 1981 despite the Vatican never formally approving the site. John Paul II's personal Marian devotion — rooted in his survival of the 1981 assassination attempt, which he attributed to Our Lady of Fátima — shaped much of the pontificate's iconographic output during this decade. Bronzital, an aluminum-bronze alloy developed specifically for Italian and Vatican coinage, replaced the earlier aluminum 200 Lire format to reduce counterfeiting vulnerability.